Paul Klinkmanís inventions page

Hereís what I wish to bring
to fruition:

An Orbiting Atmospheric Gatherer

News flash: Our team just won a Kalenian Award Honorable Mention.

Starting in November of 2005 I began going back to my alma mater, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I started working with a project team weekly in September of 2006, and then a larger project team in the 2007-2008 school year. WPI needs good projects for its students. I talked to one group about gathering gases in orbit, and also helped a lunar agriculture project team. As of Saturday, February 3, 2007, we went public at the 2007 IASTS conference with our orbiting atmospheric gatherer and lunar agriculture innovations.

The orbiting gas gatherer is now a full utility patent application with 34 claims. The patent examiner won't like me, but I needed each and every claim.

Hydrogen on the Moon

If you think there's no hydrogen on the moon, you're not quite correct. It's just hard for you to collect. The lunar regolith gatherer very cheaply collects hydrogen by heating iron hydride, and it cheaply collects oxygen. Patents are in process. I've been quite busy with patent work.

A Greenhouse

My greenhouse utility patents are in process as of June 19, 2008. My greenhouse loses 80% less heat at night than a normal greenhouse, which means it doesn't use any heating fuel on this side of Alaska. We can grow hot weather crops such as tomatoes. I hope to post details at www.KlinkmanSolar.com soon.

A democratic government is something that human beings invented.† Benjamin Franklin was an inventor and he invented the 18th century's best government by far.. If we don't invent any good government, by default we get corruption or a dictatorship. If we don't tinker with our government to make it better, by default we get the same old corruption again and again until we bequeath the corruption to our grandchildren.

A good government is fair and honest, in a world of occasionally dishonest people. It is designed to be resistant to
political campaign cash, should operate in a cost-efficient manner and
should reflect the popular will. Here are some working
corruption-resistant democratic models:

a. ††††††† Cambridge,
Massachusetts-style choice proportional representation seems to successfully fight
political candidate corruption.† I name
Cambridge
because theyíve tested their system for 63 years, and because Cambridge has a perfect bond rating of AAA from Moodyís Investors Service.† Are they financially successful or what?† One can carp that Cambridge does well because they always have full employment in Cambridge, but perhaps Cambridge always has good jobs because the city nurtured what they had for 63 years. Their elections are mostly free of
mudslinging, not overpriced for candidates, and generally nonpartisan.† Cambridge citizens feel represented on their
city council. Other success stories exist.

Choice voting murders political candidate corruption. The current contribution system inherently feeds corruption, despite our parade of innefectual campaign cash reforms. When will the voters wise up? Choice works and "reform" doesn't.

In
previous generations the political machines spent lavish sums on repeal initiative after repeal
initiative until they got rid of PR in their cities.† Only Cambridge survived the onslaught. In fact, Cambridge has survived five repeal attempts. Also, racists hated PR in the 1940s because
it gave some minor power to black city council members, as opposed to the
white people holding all the power forever.† Now that most of our big cities have multicultural power sharing, that racial exclusion attitude may have changed. Check
out the web writings of Dr. Douglas Amy on this subject. Finally, anticommunists in the 1950s would give anything to hold all democratic power forever away from the communists, or from any pinko or Eisenhower Republican who could be painted as a communist.

We can slowly spread the idea of "Choice" Proportional Representation
through thousands of college student councils, union locals, small co-op or corporate boards of directors
and city councils, until the idea has widespread acceptance.† You and two friends can win a small victory in your corner of the world. Try it! Then some of your local voters won't be so afraid of the new idea. After flipping a few city councils we change a couple of state legislatures, then continue on up toward Congress.

Caution: "Choice" Proportional Representation is not the same as voting for a party slate, as is done in national elections in countries such as Britain.

b.†††††††† Suppose we
solved a difficult political issue by randomly picking twelve anonymous
citizens and paying them to come to a wise solution?† We call this the jury system.† In England
the system has been tested for 1000 years.†
I see little corruption among the jury members at least, low cost, and
usually a reflection of the popular will.†
Every bureaucracy needs a standing jury to help make governmental
decisions.

c. ††††††† Consensus
process is used when we need great wisdom.†
However, in terms of people-hours it isnít cheap.† Trial juries use consensus.

d.†††††††† Letís
implement an online government, just a few of us, over trifling issues at first.† We can review the effectiveness of various
home cleaning remedies to start, and move on to review consumer products.† Letís study what governmental ideas work
online and what we still have to fix, starting from the above examples of
honest government.† Letís prove a
prototype of a better government that works.†
Donít you want to leave the dream of a better world for your
descendents?† Then letís start writing
some code and imagining the dream.

The Fog Pond

My Solar Fog Pond is an appropriate technology solution to
world desertification.† It irrigates
deserts and creates a fresh water supply from salt or brackish water.† The Fog Pond uses mostly locally available
materials.

You thought that I wouldnít tell you any inventing details
on this web page?† I decided to make my
Fog Pond a public invention.†

Any pond in a desert covered with heavy oils (sorry, but most locally produced vegetable and nut oils will evaporate too quickly) will heat up during the day.†
Oil prevents evaporation. Multiple levels of brine in the pond will help even more to capture heat, according to one Israeli researcher..

At night, the temperature in almost any desert drops to
freezing.† If the oil on the pond is
skimmed off, the warm-hot water will meet the cold air.† Great billows of fog will form on the pondís
surface and will be blown downwind to the edge of the pond.† A fog collecting net will capture some of the
fog, and this fresh water can be channeled into a fresh water storage
area.† The rest of the fog will blow over
and around the fog net onto the cropland/desert beyond.

It doesnít take much fog to grow food crops if the moisture
arrives every night without fail.† The
tallest tree on earth, the Coast Redwood, lives on almost nothing but fog all
summer.†

A series of long, thin ponds will act synergistically,
watering the cropland in between ponds every night no matter which way the wind
blows.† Beyond the cropland, grasses will
take root and live off of residual night fog.†
Large green areas will experience enhanced natural rainfall.

Remember that the SaharaDesert was savannah 6,000 years
ago.† Itís possible that the predations
of man have created many of the worldís deserts.† This desertification can be reversed.† In doing so, deserts become green machines
that extract carbon dioxide from the air and so the greenhouse effect can be
slowly reversed.

I want inventors to be paid

Do you want your country to be great?† Do you want a great life?† Support your inventors.† As you can see, Iím not afraid to tackle
government corruption, overpopulation and the greenhouse effect.† I suspect that you never dreamed of having
answers to any of these problems.

Do you want your country to drown in debt until you bow to
your new masters?† Starve your
inventors.† Right now Congress is pretty
much making the stupid choice. Even worse, Congress is actually considering changing the patent laws from "whoever comes up with an idea first, gets the patent" to "whoever claims the idea first, gets the patent". This could legalize industrial espionage. Imagine John Gotti getting a patent on a new defibrillator!

A good invention could cost thousands of dollars to patent,
with no guarantee that the inventor will ever see a dollar.† Thatís why most inventors make zero.

Inventors donít need millions of dollars, but they need to
live indoors and they need food.†

First, I propose that the patent process be equivalent in
cost and in complexity to the copyright laws.†
If a person invents and publishes something, legally it becomes his or
her patented device by definition and without filing expensive government
papers.† This change in the law will keep
people like myself from sitting on trillion dollar
inventions for thirty years straight, or from taking the ideas to the grave.

Second, I propose that an impartial government board reward
thousands of first-time inventors (and not huge corporations) that come up with
profitable if not lucrative inventions.†
Then the government gives corporations a chance to bring the inventions
to market, with royalties for the inventors.†
Weíre a free market society, so if we pay inventors weíll get more of
them.† If we starve inventors we get less
of them.

Finally, we need an inventor's cooperative society. Invention, by rights, is a cooperative activity. Members must be bound (financially, possibly by sweat equity) to secrecy, and membership within any certain field of invention will be compartmentalized to further reduce secrecy violations. Members will be paid for their partial ideas, and even for good efforts on unsuccessful projects.

I will not live forever.

I may die of old age someday far in the future, or I may go quicker. An acquaintance pointed out that many, many inventors take their secrets to the grave. Our country's curse is that the government fosters an invention-killing secrecy system.